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Beautiful Souls Response

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Submitted By jlatertoonasty
Words 666
Pages 3
John Later
Professor Shabbat
English 015/102
21 October 2013
Response to Chapter 4 of Beautiful Souls
By now it’s safe to say that the book Beautiful Souls is about people who stand out because they face adversity and don’t just sit there and let bad things happen on their watch. With saying this, I feel that the final chapter of this book was one of the best ones because it shows how one doesn’t have to “doctor the papers of desperate refugees fleeing the Gestapo or mislead the guards at a prison camp in the throes of a bloody war” to be considered a beautiful soul (Press 134). It’s an important thing to know this because after reading most of this book, I thought that I couldn’t possibly bracket myself with people like Paul Grueninger or Avner Wishnitzer because I don’t live in an area in which people are being figuratively suffocated or oppressed; however, after reading Leyla Wydler’s story, I realized that me along with every other common citizen has the ability to be a “beautiful soul”. Leyla Wydler basically got caught up in a big Ponzi scheme that she narrowly avoided because of her hunches on how sketchy her former companies tactics and financial books looked. In this situation, Wydler could have easily said “Ok, I’m out of this mess so I really don’t have to warn anybody. If the ship sinks, too bad for the people on it.” However, because Wydler is a “beautiful soul”, she decided to take action and start mailing letters to important news agencies, companies, as well as people who invested in her company about the fraudulent actions that were taking place behind the scenes. This wasn’t such an easy decision for Wydler to make because her whole credibility that she worked so many hard years for, her future job opportunities, and even her legal record were all at stake when she decided to challenge her old company’s scandalous secrets. I know for a fact that I probably wouldn’t step up and make things right because if I had a family like Wydler did and was trying to support everybody with one paycheck, I would put my family over the people that I didn’t know. Yes, this sounds really selfish but have someone put themselves in a position like hers. It’s almost guaranteed that the fact that that person won’t be able to put food on the family table or get their kids what they want for the holidays if they fail at challenging their corrupt former company. For a normal person, these stipulations would be a strong enough deterrent to make the person not want to challenge the company, but Wydler did and that is what makes her stand out from the rest. A normal person has their opinions and morals on what is right and just but stay silent because of the consequences that may come from their opposition. It truly takes a “beautiful soul” to stand up to these breaches of morals and righteousness while acknowledging that what they’re doing could be very harmful to themselves or others. Eyal Press’s book Beautiful Souls comes to a close with a chapter about a seemingly ordinary woman doing something extraordinary just because she didn’t want people to make a huge mistake and lose almost everything that they had. This woman is really a testament to how somebody should be and I’m glad I read about her. In taking the model for what Wydler did as a good person as well as citizen, I can apply the lessons that this chapter taught me to how I live and go about my life. In doing this, I may not become a “beautiful soul” like the others in this book, but I can guarantee that at the closing stages of my life, when I sit myself down and reminisce on the person that I was, I will proudly know that I was a genuinely congenial and good-hearted person.

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